Australian literature
Literary Migrations
Sakr’s novel is teeming with the feelings of its characters: anger, despondency, ambivalence, shame, joy; with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and school friends; with Arabic and Turkish phrases: Jamal has Lebanese family in and near Lurnea in Western Sydney, and an estranged Turkish one; with familial expectations; with violence, both threatened and enacted; with sexual acts that transgress cultural proscriptions; and with a shifting, sometimes lush literary style.
Seeking Derangement
In her presentation of Anja, Howell has fallen into a contemporary trap, which is to presume that in modern literature a woman losing it is inherently understandable. That to shoulder a great emotional burden makes a female character three-dimensional and complex. Rather, Anja who apparently has always operated on a self-sufficient basis, continues over the course of this book to isolate herself and to consider herself set apart from the world.
Against Lifestyle
Slowly, Shirley also reveals itself as an anti-lifestyle text. For each sparkling marker of inner-city affluence, there is an equal and opposite undercurrent of dread edging the novel towards murkier territory. The clearest – but also least interesting – instance is the enigma which frames the book: an ostensibly antic affair regarding the narrator’s mother, once a well-regarded celebrity chef whose career was halted many years ago when she was photographed outside her house smeared in blood. Whose blood? What happened?